We Fought for Ardnish Read online

  I had hoped to take an easier route, but after encountering the patrol, I suspected the mountains would be crawling with the enemy. We would have to take the difficult route I’d been told about, over a ridge. It would be steep and possibly icy, but if I managed to navigate the way to the correct spot, there would be a fixed rope to help us.

  After many hours we reached the bottom of a gulley, and stared up through the falling snow. My spirits soared. This must be it!

  ‘Here we are, Françoise, just as I was told. Look! Three distinctive pine trees together on a rocky ledge on the left – that must be them. It’s about a two-hour climb to the top but we’re running out of daylight. There should be a building somewhere around here where we can spend the night and tackle the climb first thing tomorrow.’

  We scanned the area for the hut, snow dumping all around us in the twilight. At last Françoise called out, ‘Over here, I’ve found it!’

  ‘Thank goodness! I thought we’d be spending the night in a snow hole,’ I called back, rushing over to where she stood.

  ‘I must have been standing on the roof,’ she exclaimed. ‘See, there’s the chimney.’

  We cleared the snow away from the door, using our snowshoes as shovels. Soon we were wrapped in our blankets in front of a roaring fire with our outer clothes hanging up to dry. We optimistically searched for food but there was nothing to be found. We’d had a hard day on only the bitter coffee and bread provided by our unfortunate guards that morning. The blizzard raged outside, but in the warmth, with Françoise beside me, I felt I could relax. The building was well hidden by the woods and thick snow, and the smoke wouldn’t be seen in the dark.

  As we lay on the hard bed wrapped up in blankets, my tummy rumbled, sending Françoise into fits of giggles.

  ‘I was thinking of chicken casserole,’ I admitted. ‘Claude’s wife Marie makes the best one I’ve ever tasted. Fingers crossed there will be some waiting for us in Les Contamines tomorrow.’

  The fire illuminated her face, only a few inches from mine. I realised I was looking too intently at her and averted my gaze.

  ‘Your turn,’ I said. ‘How did you come to join the SOE?’

  ‘Well, as you know, my family is French, but we’ve lived in Canada for ten years. We still have other family members back in France . . .’ Her words trailed away, and she took a moment to compose herself. ‘They suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis. All the rumours that we hear are horrifying . . . Anyway, that’s what made me want to do something, to join the war effort and fight. A woman at the recruitment office put me forward as an agent. Apparently they needed native French speakers.’

  ‘Where in Canada do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, a tiny place, you won’t have heard of it. Chéticamp, in Nova Scotia on the east coast.’

  ‘My aunt Sheena lives in Nova Scotia, near Mabou on Cape Breton Island!’ I exclaimed. ‘My goodness, I’m surprised there are French speakers there; I’ve only ever heard of Highlanders settling in that part of the world.’

  Her eyes lit up. ‘Mabou is only fifty miles from us, I know it well. You must tell me about her. I might even know her, though the French and English-speaking communities tend to keep to themselves, I’m afraid.’

  I was astonished. I had known another agent was joining me, but not that she would be female or Canadian. And now here we were, two people from different continents, finding this shared connection.

  ‘I would love to go there some day,’ I said.

  ‘You must. Visit your aunt, Angus, it’s lovely. Mabou is right on the sea; it has the most beautiful trees. In the fall they glow golden and red and you walk on a carpet of beautiful leaves. Go to Lake Ainslie, too. The Mull River flows into the estuary there. Fantastic fishing. Do you fish?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Chéticamp is about the same size town as Mabou but French. They speak Gaelic in Mabou, though. We have our own school and hospital . . . you would think the two places were a thousand miles apart. The young from both villages speak mostly English these days; it’s becoming the common language. It’s lovely and hot in the summer and cold as death in the winter.’

  Her face was radiant, animated by the discussion and the flickering light from the fire.

  ‘Aunt Sheena came over just before the war,’ I said, ‘to see her family and to meet me and my mother. She stayed for two months. She works as a teacher at the school in Mabou. My grandmother Morag and I promised Sheena we’d go out after the war. I’ll come and find you in Chéticamp.’

  ‘You must,’ she said, nodding enthusiastically.

  We lay quietly, enjoying the warmth and companionship and soon dozed off. But I woke, shivering, in the middle of the night and got up to fetch more logs. There was no sound from outside. I opened the door. Behind me, I could hear Françoise waking up.

  ‘It’s stopped snowing,’ I said. ‘I can see stars. Another couple of hours and we’ll need to move.’

  I stoked the fire then went outside and filled a saucepan with snow which I placed on the embers to melt. ‘We must drink a couple of pints of water before we get going.’

  ‘A couple of pints?’ Françoise looked aghast.

  ‘We don’t want to get dehydrated today. We have a lot of ground to cover.’

  ‘I hardly slept,’ she groaned. ‘The farmer must bring a mattress up with him when he uses this place; this bed is rock-hard.’

  I handed her the water can and she began to drink. ‘Françoise, we have a little time before we set off. Can you tell me something about Camp X?’

  She smiled. ‘Well, what have you heard?’

  ‘Only that it’s our training centre in Canada. Some of the training officers we had went over there. I knew Mad Major Fairbairn and Hamish Pelham-Burn.’

  ‘Fairbairn is extraordinary,’ said Françoise. ‘He invented the amazing knife we use, didn’t he? He must be well into his fifties and yet he can throw the fittest twenty-year-old agent on his back in a second, with a knife to his throat.’

  ‘True enough . . . but I’m more interested in you,’ I prompted.

  She laughed. ‘Well, I applied to join the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, and when I arrived at the recruitment centre in Halifax there was a leaflet explaining all the various units and what they did, but I saw that all the interesting stuff was for men. I resigned myself to sitting behind a desk for the rest of the war. So, my expectations were low when I was taken in for interview by a very impressive lady, a major. I decided I had nothing to lose in telling her I wanted a real challenge, to be outdoors, that I was good at sports, was reasonably intelligent and of course bilingual.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘Anyway, she asked me to give her some time. She said she had an idea and could I come back two days later. So I did. I was given a train ticket to Toronto and instructed to go for an interview at number 25 King Street, which was a bank, and then on to Whitby to undergo more interviews and some tests. I had no idea what I was in for, but it turned out to be a three-day initiation course with eight men.’

  ‘What did you have to do?’

  She shrugged. ‘Where to start? We had to run for five miles carrying a pack, swim in Lake Ontario – breaking the ice on the surface before we got in, stand in front of armoured glass and get shot at with a Tommy gun to test our reaction, then they got us very drunk to see if we were loose-tongued. We weren’t allowed any sleep one night and then we had hostile interviews the next day, in French, to see how we reacted. Only three of us got through to the next stage.’

  ‘Well done. Sounds similar to what we had to go through. Tough going, isn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly is, but my goodness, when the course started at Camp X there were no weak links. I was the only woman there and I wasn’t given any leeway, apart from a lighter pack. We had no idea what we were training for.’

  ‘Was your course run by Canadians?’

  ‘No, it was largely run by the British Security Co-ordination, but the students were
French speakers – Poles, Czechs, Romanians and so on – all recruited with the intention that they would go back into their own countries to train the resistance.’

  ‘So you went straight into training?’

  She seemed surprised. ‘Not straight away. I had the test first.’

  ‘Oh?’ I leaned closer.

  ‘I was called in to see Colonel Brooker, the Commanding Officer.’ Straightening her back, she mimicked a posh English accent: ‘ “Right, Villeneuve, we have a problem. We need a dangerous enemy agent eliminated, and we think a woman will be most effective. It would appear that you are the only one we can call on. His real name is Hans Bauer, but he’s in room seventeen at the Royal York under the name of Graham Hamilton.” ’

  ‘They wanted you to do what?’ I asked, astonished.

  ‘I know! I felt I’d only just started my training. But he took out a revolver, loaded it and gave it to me. “Report back to me straight away. Mac here will be your driver.” I was pretty shaken, I can tell you.’

  I stared at her, horrified. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Well, it was about midnight when Mac dropped me at the front door of the hotel. I told the woman at the reception I was Mr Hamilton’s wife and needed an extra key as I was surprising him on his birthday. She gave it to me.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that. She obviously couldn’t see my knees trembling under my coat. So I walked as confidently as I could to the door of room seventeen and just flung open the door. He was sitting bolt upright in bed. I raised the gun, fired, and missed, so I fired twice more – and missed again.’

  ‘Wait . . .’ I began. Something wasn’t right.

  ‘Exactly,’ she laughed. ‘Of course, then I realised they were blanks. My colleagues were killing themselves with laughter when I got back to the car, but they seemed to be very impressed with me.’

  Françoise continued: ‘One of their concerns was that female agents wouldn’t be able to kill in cold blood. Fairbairn was convinced that at the crucial moment we would be reluctant and become the victim instead. His view was that our maternal instincts would kick in and we would be more likely to injure the person, which would then backfire. “Kill or be killed,” he would repeat, over and over.’

  ‘What an initiation,’ I said, impressed. ‘So what did Fairbairn teach you? Same as he taught the troops in Scotland, I’m guessing?’

  ‘I imagine so. He did say something about how this test for female agents never failed. Did you read his book, All-In Fighting? I was shocked I must say, me a quiet girl from the backwater. We weren’t taught mouth slitting, eye gouging or garrotting at school. Mind you, the tips from his books on self-defence for women came in useful, especially “The Cinema Hold, a Defence for Wandering Hands’’.’ She grinned cheekily.

  ‘But anyhow, the course. It was five weeks’ long. We had to run up and down dunes with sixty-pound packs and rifles for fitness training. There was fieldcraft, map reading, silent killing, interrogation, lots of wireless work, and obviously parachuting, otherwise I wouldn’t have been floating down a few days ago. Oh, and climbing – I enjoyed that side of it. We went to the Blue Mountains at Collingwood for three days, and it was wonderful. I’m light and fairly strong; it seems I can pretty well go up anything.’

  I nodded. ‘I was impressed watching you in the couloir.’

  She smiled. ‘Oh, were you indeed?’

  I could feel myself blushing.

  ‘There was lots of boat work on Lake Ontario, too. I loved the canoeing. Why there isn’t more done in Cape Breton I’ve no idea. Then we did weapons training and a whole week of demolition work. There isn’t much I can’t blow up, you know.’

  ‘Sounds like Fairbairn,’ I murmured. ‘Intensive.’

  ‘Exactly. No time off at all, and long days and nights. But anyhow, that’s my story – then I got posted to F section because they wanted French-speaking women agents.’

  ‘Did they say anything about reprisals? That’s something that causes me the biggest difficulty.’

  ‘Reprisals? Oh yes, it was your Scottish instructor, Captain Pelham-Burn, who covered that sort of thing. He gave us some horrific examples. He said it was best to know in advance. Not far from here, in Annecy, an SOE agent led a team of French Resistance fighters who blew up an arms factory. The next morning, Gestapo troopers burst into houses, dragged out whole families and hanged ten men in the town centre in front of their wives and children.’ She shuddered. ‘No wonder so few French are prepared to get involved, even to turn informers. Imagine, Angus, if one of the Resistance men were to tell his wife about an attack planned on Germans in a certain village and she were to tell a friend. Mightn’t that friend be tempted to tell the Germans, to save her village from destruction?’

  ‘That’s why I struggle with it,’ I admitted. ‘Some choice.’

  ‘But we had something you wouldn’t have had,’ Françoise went on. ‘Just down the road was Bowmanville, which was an internment camp for German officers. Believe it or not, sometimes a German officer would be sent along to interrogate us. There was an underground room set up with all the torture paraphernalia, and we were given electric shocks and stripped naked to demoralise us. We were told we had to hold out for forty-eight hours whatever happened, in order to allow our Resistance circuit to move away.’

  ‘Nothing if not thorough,’ I murmured, shaking my head. ‘I remember, at Arisaig, men who had been tortured, but managed to escape, came to talk to us. We would all listen with our mouths hanging open.’

  ‘The whole point is that I know what might happen to me and I’m prepared for it.’

  We sat in silence for a while. I supposed we were both thinking of other agents – friends – who had been captured and tortured.

  Then Françoise yawned. ‘I’m famished,’ she moaned. ‘Take my mind off my stomach, Angus, and tell me a story about Fairbairn. He’s such an intriguing man.’

  I handed the water can back to her, urged her to drink more and stoked the fire.

  ‘I first met him at Inverailort Castle. He was standing at the top of the stairs at the big house with his friend Eric Sykes. They were both wearing casual army fatigues and looked for all the world like harmless elderly men, ready to greet our arrival. About twelve of us students were lined up at the bottom. All of a sudden, Fairbairn seemed to lose his footing. He clutched at Sykes and the pair of them came crashing down the entire length of the staircase, head over heels. We couldn’t believe our eyes. But in a moment they were up on their feet, and each had a student on his back with a knife at his throat. Fairbairn told us he had learned his trade in Shanghai, training the police to break up the gangs. God, he was hard.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve heard.’ Françoise nodded.

  ‘It was January when I arrived at Inverailort. On the second day we had to swim almost a mile across Loch Eilt, then climb up to the top of An Stac, a craggy mountain almost three thousand feet high, then run back down into a Nissen hut and assemble our pistols from pieces, in the dark. I remember shaking with cold and exhaustion. If we didn’t do it within the allotted time we had to do it the next day and then the next. If we failed on the third attempt, we were sent back to our regiments in disgrace.’

  ‘Our tales are similar,’ Françoise remarked. ‘He really did have a method, didn’t he? Tell me, where is Inverailort?’

  I smiled at the way she pronounced ‘Inverailort’. ‘If I start telling you about the West Highlands I may not stop,’ I confessed. ‘The place is so close to my heart.’

  Françoise stood up and looked out of the window. ‘Still no sunrise.’ Then she walked back to the fireplace, sat close beside me and linked her arm through mine. ‘Go on, tell me about your home. We have a long, hard day ahead of us so give me something nice to think about.’

  I relished the chance to tell her all about my beloved Ardnish.

  ‘Very well. Just shut your eyes and try to picture my home in your mind. Can you hear the murmur of the w
aves as they wash back and forth, the mewing of the kittiwakes? And there’s the call of the corncrake from the big field behind the house. You’re sitting on the bench at the front door, looking south towards the sun and across Loch Ailort. To your left are another ten houses in a crescent, replicating the curve of the beach. Two of those houses are occupied, with smoke curling out of their chimneys. The others are in various stages of collapse, their heather thatch and wooden struts jutting up with sheep taking shelter inside. Beyond is a steep knoll that you need to go over to get to Laggan farm, and at the end of the bay, a steep, smooth rock face dropping down to the water. Turn your head to the west and you’ll see a burn where you can hear the water tumbling on its way down to the sea. Beyond that, and out of sight, is Glasnacardoch and the school that I went to until it closed ten years ago.

  ‘The village is called Peanmeanach – that means Pennyland in English.’

  ‘You have a gift, Angus,’ Françoise murmured. ‘I’m enjoying this.’

  I was elated by her words. ‘Well, my father used to say Ardnish is “the place where God was born”. Although it’s remote, with cold, hard winters, it’s a beautiful area – one where few visitors come, yet people don’t ever want to leave.

  ‘Our district is known as the Rough Bounds, because it’s so hard to get to over such wild countryside. The mountains rise, rough and grey, straight up from the shore. Loch Ailort is five miles long and a mile across, narrower in places. And part of the military training centre is at Roshven House, owned by friends of my family and which my grandfather helped to build. I could swim across the loch to it. At the top of the loch is Inverailort Castle; I can walk or row there in three hours. And just behind the peninsula, to the north, is Arisaig House. So you see, Ardnish is right in the centre of the SOE patch.’

  ‘How funny that you ended up training right across from your childhood home,’ said Françoise.

  ‘You’d love it, Françoise. The sea sparkles in the sun like you’ve never seen before, and the bed of flowers on the machair is so remarkable – yellow, pink, white, blue – it seems sacrilegious to walk on it. When I was tiny I used to lie on my mother’s lap while she made daisy chains for me to wear. We would bathe in the burn, tingling and refreshing in August, harsh and painful in the winter. That river was the life blood of the village for cooking, drinking, washing clothes. After bathing I would roll myself dry in the grass and my mother would worry about my getting stung by bees.